What can we still rely on today?

From Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung

What can we still rely on today?  What can we hold on to?  I am not a pessimist, but we scarcely need reminding that we are now in a "crisis" of values as profound as it is far-reaching. Ever since the youth and student revolts of the late 1960s,* there are no longer any institutions or guardians of values which are not in crisis or have not been radically challenged.  Where today is there any undisputed authority?  We used to be told: the pope, the bishop, the church says;  or the prime minister, the government, the party says; or the teacher, the professor, "your father" says.  Where nowadays could we even settle  discussion -let alone pacify a demonstration- with an appeal to such authorities? No; the state, church, courts, army, school, family -all seem to be insecure. They are no longer accepted without question -least of all by young people- as guardians of values.

With this critical questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways of life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well.  Liberalization** was necessary but often went further than had been foreseen or planned.  Elaborate processes designed to get rid of taboos frequently turned out to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative.  The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating.  The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency, or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.

The large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved.  Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped.  For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion, or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction.  For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing."  For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding, passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has vanished, along with religion, as Nietzsche predicted.  For -as is becoming increasingly clear- it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?


In response to a challenge about a statement about the impossibility of there being any kind of moral absolute based on a rationalistic-materialistic framing of reality, I had a vague recollection of this statement by the late ecumenical theologian Hans Kung in his book, titled in the authorized English translation, to tweak the nose of Bertrand Russell's fans (my guess), is "Why I Am Still A Christian."  The title of the original was Woran Man Sich Halten Kann, which is more or less the meaning of the first sentence in the text.  In the  preface to the book Kung specifically said he was attempting to summarize the most important points in his three large and fine books of rigorous testing of the bases of Christian faith, Does God Exist, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life?  I went back to the book and have decided to go through it during Lent as I once went through Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, a project that started one Advent and lasted pretty much through the extended Christmas season.  

Given Hans Kung's active and hard work on ecumenical union, not only with Christians but with colleagues from the other major monotheistic religions and with others from other traditions, quite universally,

- given his and his co-workers at his Global Ethics Institute, striving to promote the moral and humane conduct among adherents to all traditions

- and, given, the rigorous devil's advocacy he makes in those three mentioned books (he makes atheists' case better than any atheist I've ever read, and made a better one for belief)

I think you can be confident that if he could have found a convincing, rigorous, durable purely rationalistic origin for absolutes of moral conduct he would not only have admitted it, he'd have promoted it knowing that the atheist, the morally unreliable, we will always have with us.  At least in the present dispensation.

For a book not yet forty years old, his citation of "youth" and older generations might seem a little odd to those who can't remember the grandparents and parents he was talking about. The secularization he focuses on here is far more advanced as a general world trend. Certainly by the time of his death he realized that it was so general a trend that in many cases, such as the English speaking world, the churches were in many cases as fully secularized, in full pursuit of the kind of amorality, in some notable cases, as those without any pretenses of holding religious ideas or associating themselves with any identity. I think, it may be the case that the believed decline in "mainline Christianity" may be due more to their adherence to something more in line with the Gospel of Jesus than their concessions to secularism.  The "white evangelicals" the TV-night club "Christians" have made the most extreme of all concessions to a-Christian secularism and they have flourished in the secularized, media-saturated milieu.

The consequences of the loss of acceptance of any authority -the typically secularist, play-lefty American wet-dream of absolute freedom- is certainly represented as opposed to morality in his list of alternatives:

. . . why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?

rejecting the alternatives of morality, the list of self-centered, selfishness left is an honest description of the morality of easily the large majority of "white evangelicals," "traditional Catholics" and the largest part of, really, what most of us do when we come up with a choice between the moral alternative and what we really want.  It has been that way through all of our history, though the chance to choose the selfish part was more restricted to those with wealth and power, the richer and more powerful the more obvious.  Whether the Tudor or Stuart kings, the various royal houses of Europe and beyond, the various scheming and amoral families that had control of the papacy for large stretches of early modernism, the Czars of Russia, their reproduction under would-be Marxism, the continuation of that under Putin, the Emperors of China, both those of feudalism and currently under Communism, etc.

The "freedom" that he opposes to "oppression" is freedom for the other, for the neighbor as well as to yourself.  No one I've ever met is against being free to do what they want to, human oppression is always in operation along with the oppressors being free to do what they want to do.  That is, certainly, an aspect of freedom with few if any secular-political-philosophical declarations of freedom that is seldom considered and is taken as a given only by those too stupid to have the slightest concept of such abstracted ideals as put into effect in real human societies and under real human governance.  The secular American left of my generation could, under that heading of "freedom" overlook Mao and Brezhnev and even Pol Pot (for a time) and the American right can with overlooking America's client fascists and their millions, even billions enslaved and millions murdered, the reason the Republican-fascists slob all over Putin and Orban and whoever else Murdoch or Trump,etc. want to do business with.

I think a lot of the crisis of faith in authorities is due to the growth of the middle-class allowing them to aspire to have, as Huey Long the would-be Trump well before Trump had it, "every man a king," a promotion of a fantasy to those with only a little relative power and at lower budget levels to maintain that as a delusion.  

I think also that Hans Kung may not have realized that with what may, sometimes, sometimes even rarely, legitimate authorities from those institutions he listed as now discredited, the most dangerously unregulated entities, media figures (such as on FOX or worse), show-biz figures (such as Reagan and Trump), billionaires with even a slight sense of how to mount phony PR (such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs), Youtube and pod-cast hate-talk bigmouths (take your pick) etc. will fill in the gaps left by the discrediting of traditional authority.  Eating up so much of the conscious attention of most people with anything from a radio to the most sophisticated online connection, the modern media, the internet, the very ratfuckable algorithms (if there is artificial intelligence, it's got to be the stupidest intelligence, ever), has produced a nightmare version of authority.  

And it is almost always an authority which shares this with Satan, it will always be strongest when it is appealing to the worst things in us.  I think that every world danger we have, Putin in Russia, Republican-fascists in the United States, various smaller and very dangerous figures in Europe and North America, many of the dictatorships in the third world, the international gangster organizations, the extraction industries, the international cartels, etc. have their power or maintain it against the world and public good due to the power and secular amorality of the mass media.

That's as true of the remaining influential ink on paper New York Times as it is of FOX or Facebook or Youtube.  The part that the NYT played in putting Trump in power through its thirty years of lies about Hillary Clinton deserves to destroy its credibility as much as the priest-pedophile scandal has to destroy the credibility of the all-unmarried-male Catholic hierarchy.

The revelation of discredit and corruption that comes with the the pulling back of the curtain to expose the phony PR is hardly confined to traditional traditional or quasi-religious academic authority, it is as true of secular authority as well as religious, it extends well into what is taken to be secular virtue, as well. I have rather specialized in my skepticism of the most sacrosanct of those as is encapsulated in the American First Amendment.  

The most basic pseudo-moral absolute that imperils us today, one which is granted the most enormous privilege ever given to such dangerous immorality in the guise of virtue, the privilege for the mass media to intentionally lie to its highest profitability (as can be read in the internal e-mails from FOX during the attempted putsch) in the American "First Amendment."  When your profitability model relies on harnessing the power of mass-immorality and gullibility, as you immorally plan on using immorality to make you rich, your own sense of truth and reason will consciously, admittedly be thrown aside on behalf of making money.  That's as true of the New York Times in a little way, of NPR in a "non-profit" scheme, as it is of the most corrupt pod caster or Youtube channel schmuck.

Still, I think that Hans Kung's approach to the problem works very well on an individual and even a societal scale. And the importance of that can in no way be taken as inconsiderable.  The choice to choose what is right over what is wrong is not done on a corporate or even a club basis, it is an individual choice, it is, in the most true sense of it, a choice to believe something.  It is a choice to really, effectively believe:
 
freedom is better than oppression, justice is better than self-interest, non-violence is better than violence, love is better than hate, peace is better than war, we MUST be just,w MUST tell the truth, NOT steal, NOT commit adultery and Not murder WE MUST BE FAIR.

Kung almost gives in to the sin of relativizing even within his listing of absolutely essential moral absolutes when he says:

Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness,

because the very trouble is that WE MUST HOLD THOSE MORAL VALUES AS SELF EVIDENT EVEN WHEN DOING THE OPPOSITE WILL GET US WHAT WE, generally stupidly, BELIEVE WE WANT. What we want for ourselves is the origin of all of the evil we are capable of when we don't take the moral alternative as being absolutely required of us.  Secularism, modernism, "enlightenment rationality" has nothing in it that will make that choice reliably taken by a majority of People in any society or in most places in the world without accepting a supernatural origin of that requirement.

That is what cannot be done on a purely rationalistic basis because it is always possible to rationalize doing what we want to no matter what the cost to others, other People, other living, sentient beings, the local and even world environment, etc. is.  

With modern technology, the products of amoral, secular science and technology (especially global warming), the extraction industries, the weapons industries (physicists and technologists evil gift of nuclear weapons), the organization of secular-clerical efficiency and now computerized technology, even down to the horrific use of Western provided facial recognition to make a place like China into a sci-fi dystopian dictatorship, we can't afford any widespread rejection of morality because the consequences of it are too high.  

Putin, the KGB man and so ultimate company man, the man who followed the Chinese Communists' business model of scrapping pretenses of socialism while keeping the political monopoly of Communism and outdoing the worst of the capitalists at their own game, is pulling out of the Nuclear Arms Treaty as a game of chicken with the West for opposing his imperial annexation of Ukraine.  America's Republican-fascists are in his pocket.  So is a considerable part of the American media and the tin pot "American left" the Greens, and dear old Noam Chomsky.  If I live long enough I think Chomsky, who I once regarded as a kind of intellectual, atheist, secular saint, turning out to be a latter day mid-20th century American Stalinist hack might become something of a milestone in my complete rejection of secularism.  Of course I'm not in favor of the establishment of religion, agreeing with Madison in one thing, that establishment of a state religion is a guarantee of its corruption, but a secularized society in which what you watch on the screen is what you mistake as true is even more dangerous and more bound to corruption.

I don't dream of retreating into a "Christian summer" of the kind that Karl Rahner imagined as he nostalgically declared that we are in a "winter season of Christianity " in which the full flower of Christian cultural, societal and political influence is felt.  The history of Christianity mixed with political power and institutional strength was, for the most part, a hot house profusion of unreliable and gaudy blossoms, more typically a hideous fake polyester stage set of phoniness. What admitted good it was over classical and European paganism was not enough to avoid scandalous corruption.  That is how it was so easily discredited as, in fact, the similar Wizard of Oz facade of liberal democracy and academic credibility has now fallen, too. The typical stereotype of ugly Americanism in the post-WWII period, now turning in on itself under the likes of Marjory T. Green and other MAGA fascists, is a similar thing.  

I think that one of the lesser discussed items of Christian faith, the idea that we are to pray for God's kingdom on Earth through God's will being done must mean the best days of Christianity must lie in that as of yet unrealized hope.  Rationally, I shouldn't believe that little evidenced possibility will come about, though the prophesy of Jesus that the meek will inherit the Earth leads me to start to think the idea has more credibility in it than the arrogance of modern secularism, the very thing that has provided us with the means to make the alternative impossible.  If those meek are the remnant of a nuclear apocalypse with seriously reduced life-span and a very high level of birth defects - we only have ourselves to blame for it and I hope any surviving of us will never forget that.

I will be going though at least more of Hans Kung's book if not the entire text.  I think it has as much potential for productively thinking about things as the excellent work of Brueggemann.  
 
* Finding out more about the personality of the late Benedict XVI, having known that after Kung got him, then Karl Ratzinger, a job teaching in the University of Tubingen, when the student revolts of 1968 happened and offended his sense of faculty status, his right to the respect of the students, he went to a more conservative university and took a sharp turn right when he'd become prominent as  a progressive during the Vatican II years, has given me more insight into why Benedict XVI was so uninterested in the pastoral welfare of lay Catholics.  

One of the stories I recently read was when one of his former grad students led a delegation in a visit to him, then the Pope, he made the mistake of saying he was his friend.  Benedict coldly corrected him that he was his student, not his friend. That Pope could be a real prick. I can't imagine Francis doing anything remotely as unfriendly or unkind.  It's especially remarkable as Jesus is recorded as calling his followers his friends. It is doubtful that Ratzinger, or Benedict, had many friends nor do I get the sense that he much missed them.  He was a disaster as Pope and as the chief enforcer of John Paul II, the second least pastoral Pope of the previous hundred sixty years, so far as I can discern.  

** Here, as so often when reading literate Europeans, it's necessary to point out that "liberalization" here is in line with the secularist, amoral meaning of the word popularized in France and England in the 18th century, meaning mostly freeing investors and businessmen, landowners, etc. to maximize profitability for the rising middle class and untitled wealthy, more to do with breaking down the remnants of feudalism than with much of anything else.

Such "freedoms" as promoted in the English revolution, the French Revolution" and the American revolution, with their various and never unalloyed benefits were secondary, such as freedoms for some and when those wouldn't endanger wealth accumulation, never in practice for all, certainly in their effects if not their promotion were incidental to the larger purpose.  A lot of that was more a matter of style, as can be seen in Jefferson's turn from "All men are created equal" to his mathematical analysis on the profitability TO HIM of slavery and Madison's late in life bitter skepticism about freedom.  There is nothing more telling than a 60s anti-war activist turned Republican-fascist once they were out of danger of being drafted(David Stockman to  Peter Navarro), an apostate Marxist (Horowitz is merely one of literally hundreds I could name), a cynical business monster ex-hippy (too many to choose a typical example of one), to show just how phony pseudo-morality under secularism really can get.